XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Fiction As Archive

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

How is historical imagination embedded in the writing of fiction? Approaching the subject from the perspective of social history, this panel examines literary works to observe how they represent what subordinate peoples (the enslaved, dependents, women) do with what is done to them. Seeing fiction as archive also challenges us to acknowledge the imaginative act of constituting archives: historians assemble and interrogate an array of sources to offer plausible interpretations of given historical processes and experiences. We interrogate literary works in pursuit of questions of gender (challenges to patriarchy), labor (crisis of slavery and other forms of forced labor, the emergence of wage labor), scientific ideologies (race science, social Darwinism), relations between literature and the law (fiction as legal archive and fiction in the legal archives), and literary models (romanticism, realism, modernism). Whatever the themes approached, the main objective is methodological: what are the main characteristics of a critical process that calls for the slow reading of fictional works in search of the history pulsing within them?

Sub Unit

• XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• A escravidão na ficção e nos arquivos judiciais - Sidney Chalhoub, Harvard University

• Literature and Law in Machado de Assis's Helena - Ingrid Brioso Rieumont, Mellon Faculty Fellow, Dartmouth College

• A República em Branco e Negro - Matheus Gato de Jesus, Universidade Estadual de Campinas\ CEBRAP

• A favela modernista: o Morro da Providência nas crônicas de Orestes Barbosa e Benjamin Costallat. - Leonardo Affonso de Miranda Pereira, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro - PUC-Rio

Chair

• Sidney Chalhoub, Harvard University

Session Organizer

• Sidney Chalhoub, Harvard University